How Vladislav Surkov Destroyed Truth in Politics
Putin’s ‘Grey Cardinal’ might just be the most influential man you’ve never heard of. Modern politics makes a lot more sense once you have.
Vladislav Surkov is far from a household name. In fact, unless you’re an expert in Russian politics or a keen Adam Curtis or Peter Pomerantsev fan, you’ve probably never even heard his name before. But his influence on politics, at first in Russia, and now around the world is difficult to understate.
Surkov can be credited with bringing ideas from the worlds of theatre and fine art into the world of politics, and making Russian politics a confusing and nearly impossible to truly understand mess. He served in one shape or another as a key advisor to President Vladimir Putin from 1999 all the way through to 2020, and came to be known by many as the “main puppet master of the political process” or Putin’s ‘grey cardinal’.
“In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.”
- Peter Pomerantsev in The London Review of Books
The quote above sums up the huge impact that Surkov has had on Russian politics — he’s turned it into a disorienting form of theatre in which nobody can really provide effective opposition. He’s sponsored liberal and pro-democracy groups one minute, Communists the next, and white nationalists the minute after. His description of his portfolio at the Kremlin having included “ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and modern art” makes it clear just how wide-reaching his work within the Russian government has been.
To really understand his impact outside of Russia, it’s key to look at what he’s done in Ukraine and, indirectly, in the United States.
Those who have studied the war in Ukraine in depth may know Surkov by a different name: Nathan Dubovitsky. For those who aren’t aware (aka most of us), Nathan Dubovitsky is the author of a number of books, among them Close to Zero, which I’m sure I’ll explore in a future article, as it provides a fascinating insight into Surkov’s perception of his role. What is relevant when it comes to Ukraine is a short story called Without Sky that Dubovitsky/Surkov wrote a few days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In it, he speaks of ‘non-linear warfare’, in which nobody knows what the enemy is up to, or really even who the enemy is. He argues that the purpose of non-linear war is not to ‘win’ the war per se, but rather to create a state of near constant confusion in order to effectively manage and control, as he had already succeeded doing in Russia and as the Russians were alleged to have tried their hardest to do in Ukraine during the war.
In what Foreign Policy magazine described as a ‘contradictory kaleidoscope’, Surkov and Putin have succeeded in drawing support from many sides. While during the days of the Soviet Union, the Russians were forced to rely on those on the far-left to spread their ideas, Putin can now rely on anti-EU right-wingers, anti-US left-wingers, and anti-homosexuality religious conservatives, particularly in the US. As a result, there’s little in the way of coherent opposition to Russian policy, be it foreign or domestic, as there are simply too many parties globally at least partially agreeing with some of what Russia is trying to do and letting them get away with things (and not just when it comes to Ukraine).
Of course, Without Sky isn’t the only book Nathan Dubovitsky/Vladislav Surkov book of note. His earlier 2009 work of Close to Zero can tell you a huge amount about his approach within Russia. The book focuses on a PR guru by the name of Yegor Samokhodov, who works for a regional governor. The tactics detailed in the book directly mirror what he’s done in the real world, with Samokhodov bribing newspaper editors to ‘correct’ stories that would hurt the governor’s popularity, hiring ghostwriters to publish on behalf of the governor in order to make him look smart. Of course, the book’s release was leaked to a newspaper by an ‘anonymous source’; it would make sense that this was Surkov, further working to obfuscate and confuse.
The circumstances in which the book was published are almost as strange as the content of the book itself: despite consistently having denied writing the book, Surkov wrote a preface to it, which he personally signed, in which he confusingly calls it ‘the best book [he has] ever read’ while also deriding the book’s author as an ‘unoriginal Hamlet-obsessed hack’ — perhaps one of the clearest demonstration of Surkov’s desire to confuse.
The response Surkov is trying to elicit is curious too — Pomerantsev has called it ‘exactly the sort of book Surkov’s youth groups burn on Red Square’.
The area of particular interest to many however will be the impact that Surkov’s work has had on western politics, most notably the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Surkov’s ideas aren’t as simple as lying and making up facts, but are potentially better understood as creating an alternate reality — Adam Curtis describes it as an aim to undermine people’s perception of the world, so they never know what is really happening.
Perhaps then, Donald Trump’s use of lies and seemingly endless contraditions can be considered to be at least somewhat inspired by the work of Surkov. The work of Kellyanne Conway in the early days of the Trump administration are among the clearest representation of this: she simply made up the ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ and the less said about her defence of Sean Spicer’s remarks about ‘the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period’, the better.
“Our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that, but the point remains that…”
-Kellyanne Conway on Meet the Press, January 2017
Trump of course didn’t have access to the same state-controlled media apparatus that Putin did, but his Twitter account gave him a comparable ability to set the narrative: just think how long the media spent hyperfixating on the ‘covfefe’ tweet if you want proof of that. It gave him the ability to amplify disproven and outlandish ideas that amount to little more than conspiracy theories like the claim that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election, not to mention his similar claims in 2020.
In early 2020, Surkov resigned from his post — but is he gone from power? The answer, I’m afraid, is it’s impossible to know. Maybe he’s truly left his position of power. Maybe he’s shifting the manner in which he exercises his influence over Russian politics in order to help Putin, as happened when he moved from the role of Deputy Chief of Staff to Deputy Prime Minister in 2011, or when he moved from that role to the more behind the scenes role of Assistant to the President around two years later.
Either way, Surkov has created something incredibly powerful through his work to turn Russian politics into dramaturgia (theatre craft) — the question to ask now is whether this is something he can still control. Is he still the puppet-master, or is he what Elliot Higgins of Bellingcat would call a cog in the machine of the counterfactual community?
I would like to end this article by mentioning Peter Pomerantsev, Adam Curtis, and Ned Reskinoff, all of whom have published some fantastic work on Surkov. This is just an introduction to his influence: if you’re interested in this sort of thing though, Pomerantsev’s ‘This is Not Propaganda’ and ‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia’ are both really great reads.
